Heteronormativity and gender roles also rear their ugly heads on Valentine’s Day. Gifts for ‘him’ or ‘her’ are clearly divided and marked and it’s almost impossible to find cards that represent queer couples. . . .

It’s not hard to see why Valentine’s Day is problematic for many feminists. Celebrated traditionally, Valentine’s Day magnifies many of the very systems of domination that we work to critique and dismantle.

Yes, it’s tragic that advertisers and greeting card companies aim their marketing efforts at the normal 98% of us, rather than pander to the 2% niche market of LGBT-OMG-BBQ-WTF.

Pink Triangle Services has graciously let us use a board room at their office to host a feminist mixer to get together to make Valentine (or Anti-Valentine) Day cards.

We will be supplying card stock and supplies, as well as lots of non-hetero-normative, queer and non-binary card ideas! There will also be tea and candy.

This event is *FREE* but we are asking for a $5 donation if you are able to help cover some supplies and to give back to PTS.

PTS is a safe space*, we are asking everyone to be kind and considerate of the other attendees ie: ask for proper pronouns. Please no strong perfumes. There are non-binary washrooms available. There is an elevator if needed. PTS office is on the 2nd floor of the building.

PTS is having their Women’s Night who will also be welcomed to join.

Everyone is welcomed! Please spread this event.

#FemMixer #Ottawa

*friendly reminder that safe space is not the same as an empowered space.

Curiosity led me to discover (a) she and her twin sister Jenna have a site called Feminist Twins, (b) Kayla was raised Catholic, (c) she’s bisexual, (d) she is a mortician and (e) she’s been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD).

there alot of different things I want to talk about here, its hard to narrow it down … slut shaming, growing up catholic, love, mental illness, feminism, body positivity … I don’t really know where to start. . . .

I get really moody and unstable when I get in relationships so why can’t I just date and not force myself to feel like I HAVE TO FIND [MR … maybe MS] RIGHT RIGHT NOW!?! . . .

Anyways, we will see where this goes. I don’t think he is “the one” . . .

The thing that makes me the saddest is it took a stranger (well not a complete stranger) and NOT A boyfriend to help me see how people can have [actually] good, [actually] consensual sex. I guess that speaks volumes about the a–holes I have been dating.

So (a) she’s a bisexual feminist, (b) she’s a SlutWalk organizer and (c) she’s been dating a–holes and having bad sex.

Did I mention she’s crazy? Because I covered the 2013 D.C. SlutWalk, and the vibe of serious mental illness was so heavy I think half of them had gotten day passes from St. Elizabeth’s so they could participate. It takes a special kind of crazy to march topless through the streets of Washington, D.C., waving signs and chanting slogans about rape. The solution to that kind of problem isn’t equal rights, it’s Thorazine.

This is not to suggest that all lesbians are crazy. Certainly, few of them are crazy enough to be professors of Women’s Studies, a field pioneered by genuine lunatics like Mary Daly and Joyce Trebilcot. Back in the day, my freelance research in the effects of hallucinogenic drugs led to some serious craziness, but if I’d started babbling about the gender binary and the heterosexual matrix, or ranting that “destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism,” the way Andrea Dworkin did, I’d probably be doing the “Haldol Shuffle” in a psychiatric unit somewhere. (As opposed to being a professional blogger, a career that requires complete sanity.) You need a Ph.D. and faculty tenure before you can get paid to spew the kind of deranged gibberish taught in Women’s Studies classrooms, so the amateur feminist nutjobs on Tumblr are frequently disappointed that few people appreciate their volunteer craziness. Kayla Spagnoli recently got a clue:

Thinking about shifting my activism from feminism to mental illness. It’s been a long time coming. Jason has always wondered why I gave so much to a movement that has always lashed back. It makes sense.

What you discover is that radicals have two discourses: The exoteric discourse, used when speaking to outsiders, is about “choice,” “equality,” “health,” etc. The esoteric discourse, used among fellow radicals, is an entirely different vocabulary: “Smash patriarchy,” destroy “heteronormativity and gender roles” and “systems of domination.”

And when you pull back the exoteric mask to reveal the esoteric truth of radicalism . . . well, that’s intimidation, you haters!

Author

Robert Stacy McCain is an award-winning journalist with more than 25 years of experience in the news business. He is a correspondent for The American Spectator, editor-in-chief at Viral Read and blogs at TheOtherMcCain.com.

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